Milton's England Part 6

As his end drew near he told his brother that he left only the residue of his first wife's property to their three daughters, who had "been very undutiful;" but everything else to his "loving wife, Elizabeth." Just one month before he had completed his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died on a Sunday night, November 8, 1674. He was buried beside his father in St.

Giles's, Cripplegate, and was followed to the grave by many friends. What hymns were sung we do not know, but certainly none could more fitly have been sung than that n.o.ble one by his dear friend, Sir Henry Wotton:

"How blessed is he born or taught Who serveth not another's will, Whose armour is his honest thought, And simple truth his highest skill.

"This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And having nothing, yet hath all."

Milton's wife was thirty-six years old when the poet died. She lived to be nearly eighty-nine years old, but never remarried. Deborah lived until 1727, when Voltaire writes: "I was in London when it became known that a daughter of blind Milton was still alive, old and in poverty, and in a quarter of an hour she was rich." The latest descendants of John and Christopher Milton died about the middle of the eighteenth century, but their sister Anne's posterity may perhaps be traced to-day.

The forgotten Duke of York has his great column in Waterloo Place. The scholarly but uninspired Prince Consort has his gorgeous Memorial, and a hundred n.o.bodies have their lofty monuments scattered all over England, teaching the rising generation their fathers' estimation of the relative worth of names in England's history. The only statue of Milton known to me in England, except the one on the London University Building, is the modest figure which stands, together with Shakespeare and Chaucer, upon a fountain in Park Lane opposite Hyde Park.

No student of the period which is treated in this little volume should fail to visit the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and view the portraits of the many noted men who were Milton's contemporaries.

Besides portraits of the royal families, he will note those of William Harvey, Samuel Pepys, Cowley, old Parr, Sir Henry Vane, Andrew Marvell, Cromwell and his daughter, Inigo Jones, Selden, Sir Julius Caesar, Samuel Butler, Hobbes, Dryden, Ireton, Algernon Sidney, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Chandos Shakespeare portrait. Milton's own portrait in middle life, which is little known, is most impressive, and very different from the common portraits.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE TOWER.--TOWER HILL

Except Westminster Abbey, no spot in England is so connected with every phase of England's history as is the Tower of London. A map, printed in the generation before Milton, shows us the ancient moat full of water, and the s.p.a.ce within its walls that now is gravelled then covered with greensward. North of St. Peter's little church, where lay the bones of Anne Boleyn, stretched a row of narrow gabled houses like those seen in the neighbouring London streets. The White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, stands to-day practically as it stood in William's time and Milton's. Built of durable flint stones, it has withstood time's decay as few other buildings erected far more recently have done, when they were of the soft, disintegrating quality of stone so often used in London. True, Christopher Wren faced the windows with stone in the Italian style, and somewhat modernised the exterior, but the interior remains practically as it was built over eight hundred years ago.

As there is no need of duplicating here the main facts about its history, which are to be found in every guide-book, let us confine ourselves to the chief literary and historical a.s.sociations with it, that must have appealed to the boy and man, John Milton.

One can imagine few things more exciting and stimulating to the mind of an observant boy in 1620 than a visit to the Tower. In the days when circuses were unknown, and menageries of strange beasts were a rare sight, the view of such behind the grated walls of Lion's Tower must have delighted any London lad. The wild beasts were not very numerous,--only a few lions and leopards and "cat lions,"--but no doubt they were as satisfactory as the modern "Zoo" to eyes that were unsatiated with such novelties. Whether small boys were allowed for sixpence to see the rich display of state jewels is not quite clear, yet it is certain that they were shown to strangers.

Says that indefatigable antiquarian, Stow, whose old age almost touched the babyhood of Milton: "This Tower is a citadel to defend or command the city; a royal palace for a.s.semblies or treaties; a prison of state for the most dangerous offenders; the only place of coinage for all England at the time; the armory for warlike provisions; the treasury of the ornaments and jewels of the Crown; and general conserver of the records of the king's courts of justice at Westminster."

In Milton's boyhood, the royal palace in the southeast corner of the inclosure was standing. But in his manhood, his staunch friend, Oliver, having got possession, it was pulled down. The little Norman chapel of St.

John, within the Tower, is one of the best bits of Norman work now extant in England. Its triforium, which extends over the aisles and semicircular east end, probably was used in ancient days to permit the queen and her ladies to attend the celebration of the ma.s.s, unseen by the congregation below. The chapel was dismantled before Milton's time. But doubtless as he entered it he could picture in it, more vividly than we in our later age, that scene when from sunset until sunrise forty-six n.o.blemen and gentlemen knelt and watched their armour, before King Henry IV., on the next day, bestowed upon them the newly created Order of the Bath.

In this chapel, while he was kneeling in prayer, the lieutenant of the Tower received an order to murder the young Edward V. and his brother, and refused to obey it. Here Queen Mary attended ma.s.s for her brother, Edward VI.

In the present armory, once the council chamber, King Richard II. was released from prison, and sceptre in hand and the crown on his head, abdicated in favour of Henry IV. Shakespeare thus depicts the scene, and puts the following words into the mouth of the mournful king:

"I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths, My manors, rents, revenues I forego; My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny.

G.o.d pardon all oaths that are broke to me, G.o.d keep all oaths unbroke are made to thee.

Make me that nothing have with nothing grieved, And thou with all pleased that hath all achieved!

Long may'st thou live in Richard's seat to sit, And soon lie Richard in an earthen pit!

G.o.d save King Henry, unkinged Richard says, And send him many years of suns.h.i.+ne days!"

On this same spot, in 1483, the Protector, afterward Richard III., came in among the lords in council, and asked the Bishop of Ely to send to his gardens in Ely Place, off Holborn, for some strawberries. The terror which royalty inspired--and with good reason in that day--is well described by Sir Thomas More, who was himself a prisoner in less than a half century after the scene which he so graphically describes:

"He returned into the chamber, among them, all changed, with a wonderful sour, angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and gnawing of the lips; and so sat him down in his place, all the lords much dismayed and sore marvelling of this manner of sudden change, and what thing should him ail." Then asking what should be the punishment of those who conspired against his life, and being told that they should be punished as traitors, he then accused his brother's wife and his own wife.

"'Then,' said the Protector," continues More, "'ye shall see in what wise that sorceress and that other witch ... have by their sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body!' And therewith he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon his left arm, and he shewed a werish withered arm, and small as it was never other. And thereupon every man's mind sore misgave him, well perceiving that this matter was but a quarrel ... no man was there present but well knew that his arm was ever such since his birth.

Nevertheless the lord chamberlain answered, and said: 'Certainly, my lord, if they have so heinously done they be worthy heinous punishment.' 'What,'

quoth the Protector, 'thou servest me ill with ifs and with ands; I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor!... I will not to dinner until I see thy head off.' Within an hour, the lord chamberlain's head rolled in the dust."

The author of the "Utopia," being a knight, was leniently treated while in the Tower. He paid ten s.h.i.+llings a week for himself and five s.h.i.+llings for his servant. Occasionally his friends came to see him, and urged in vain that he should propitiate Henry VIII. and his wife, Anne Boleyn, against whose marriage he had objected. But he remained immovable. "Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?" he asked, serenely, when wife and daughters pleaded with him to reconsider. Lady More pet.i.tioned Henry for her husband's pardon, on the ground of his illness and her poverty; she had been forced to sell her clothing to pay her husband's fees in prison.

But Henry had no mercy on the gentle scholar, the greatest English genius of his day, and who had been lord chancellor of England.

For a time he was allowed to write, but later, books and writing materials were removed; yet he occasionally succeeded in writing to his wife and daughter Margaret on sc.r.a.ps of paper with pieces of coal. "Thenceforth,"

says his biographer, "he caused the shutters of his cell to be closed, and spent most of his time in the dark."

When the end came, his sentence to be hanged at Tyburn was commuted by the king to beheadal at Tower Hill. Cheerful, and even with a tone of jest, he said to the lieutenant on the scaffold, "I pray thee, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let me s.h.i.+ft for myself." He removed his beard from the block, saying, "it had never committed treason," and told the bystanders that he died "in and for the faith of the Catholic Church," and prayed G.o.d to send the king good counsel. More's body was buried in St.

Peter's Church, where that of the fair young Anne Boleyn herself was soon to lie. His head, after the savage custom of the time, was parboiled and affixed to a pole on London Bridge.

Dark and b.l.o.o.d.y were the a.s.sociations that centre around the Tower in the century preceding Milton's. Few of these have touched the popular heart more than those which cl.u.s.ter around the girl-queen of nine days--the fair Lady Jane Grey. In the Brick Tower, where she was imprisoned, she wrote her last brave, pathetic words to her father and sister upon the leaves of her Greek Testament. From her prison window she saw the headless body of her boy-husband pa.s.s by in a cart from Tower Hill, and cried: "Oh, Guildford! Guildford! the antepast is not so bitter that thou hast tasted, and which I soon shall taste, as to make my flesh tremble; it is nothing compared with that feast of which we shall partake this day in heaven."

When she was ready to lay her fair young head upon the block, she cried: "I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman." "Then tied she the handkerchief about her eyes, and feeling for the block, she said, 'What shall I do? Where is it?' One of the standers-by guiding her thereunto, she laid her head down upon the block, and then stretched forth her body, and said: 'Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.'" So perished this girl of eighteen, whose beauty, learning, and tragic fate make her one of the most pathetic figures in history.

The most interesting parts of the Tower, including St. Peter's Church, the dungeons, Raleigh's cell, and the spot where he wrote his "History of the World," are not shown to ordinary visitors. They can be seen, however, by the receipt of a written order from the Constable of the Tower, and should not be missed by any student of English history. Even a few moments spent in those dark lower vaults help the torpid imagination of those who live in freedom as cheap and common as the air they breathe to realise through what horror and b.l.o.o.d.y sweat of brave men and women in the past his freedom has been bought. Though these dungeons now are clean and a few modern openings through the ma.s.sive walls admit some feeble rays of light, it is not difficult to conjure up the black darkness, filth, and vermin, and noisome odours of the past, or the shrieks of saint or sinner, who, like Anne Askew and Guy Fawkes, suffered upon the rack. Only two years before Milton's birth, the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot were immured in these dungeons, and then hanged, cut down, and disembowelled while they were still living.

In Milton's youth, in 1630, while he was writing Latin verses at Christ's College, Cambridge, that brave, heroic, n.o.ble soul, Sir John Eliot, was committed to the Tower. Those were sad days for England. Free speech in Parliament was throttled. The nation's ancient liberties were in jeopardy.

Says the historian, Green: "The early struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot.... He was now in the first vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated, and familiar with the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and vehement temperament. But his intellect was as clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the English Parliament.

He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm, and in that wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings." Of the memorable scene in Parliament in which he moved the presentation to the king of a remonstrance, in the session of 1628, a letter of the times gives a description. By royal orders the Speaker of the House stopped him, and Eliot sat abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the members. "Then appeared such a spectacle of pa.s.sions as the like had seldom been seen in such an a.s.sembly; some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing their sins and country's sins.... There were above an hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own pa.s.sions."

Says President Theodore Roosevelt of Sir John Eliot: "He took his stand firmly on the ground that the king was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the king. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower, without air or exercise, for three years, the king vindictively refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on consumption. In December, 1632, he died; and the king's hatred found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home."

At last the "man of blood," who had tried to wrest England's liberties, himself perished upon the scaffold at Whitehall, and in his condemnation the same author cites his treatment of Sir John Eliot as one of his greatest crimes. "Justice was certainly done, and until the death penalty is abolished for all malefactors, we need waste scant sympathy on the man who so hated the upholders of freedom that his vengeance against Eliot could be satisfied only with Eliot's death; who so utterly lacked loyalty, that he signed the death-warrant of Strafford when Strafford had merely done his bidding; who had made the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to establish his right to rule; and who, with incurable duplicity, incurable double-dealing, had sought to turn the generosity of his victorious foes to their own hurt."

These grisly tales of executions and of scenes of fort.i.tude we close with a few words on that valiant, n.o.ble soul, Sir Harry Vane, to whom Milton dedicated the well-known sonnet beginning: "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old."

Speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard University, Wendell Phillips, America's silver-tongued orator, uttered a memorable word upon the man whose governors.h.i.+p of Ma.s.sachusetts for two years of its infant history makes the name of Vane for ever dear to the American descendants of the Puritans:

"... Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any in practical statesmans.h.i.+p. Sir Harry Vane--in my judgment the n.o.blest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city--I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Was.h.i.+ngton or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an arrow's flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato 'all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years.' So you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilisation, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fenelon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible; like Carnot, he organised victory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preeminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, 'Remember the temptation and the age.' But Vane's ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of the age--like pure intellect, belongs to all time. Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding, 'Young men, close your Byron and open your Goethe.' If my counsel had weight in these halls, I should say, 'Young men, close your John Winthrop and Was.h.i.+ngton, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane.' It was the generation that knew Vane who gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, Veritas."--_Wendell Phillips, in his Harvard address on the "Scholar in the Republic."_

To the profligate Charles II. few men must have seemed more dangerous than the man who had dared to teach that the king had three "superiors, G.o.d, Law, and Parliament." The man who had once walked through the stately halls of Raby Castle as its master found a Tower cell his last earthly abiding-place.

When Sir Harry Vane was arraigned as a "false traitor," he made his own defence, well knowing what the end would be, but determined, for the sake of England and the cause he loved, to put his plea on record. For ten hours he fought for his life without refreshment, then later, in his prison, wrote out the substance of his plea. Though, as his biographer relates, "he had torn to pieces as if they were so much rotten thread the legal meshes in which his hunters sought to hold him fast," his doom was sealed. Something was gained when the original sentence of hideous torture and dismemberment was commuted into simple beheading. The day before his execution, Vane said to his children: "Resolve to suffer anything from men rather than sin against G.o.d.... I can willingly leave this place and outward enjoyments, for those I shall meet with hereafter in a better country. I have made it my business to acquaint myself with the society of Heaven. Be not you troubled, for I am going home to my Father."

"As one goes through Eastcheap to-day, out upon the open s.p.a.ce of Tower Hill, he finds himself among prosaic surroundings. Over the pavement rattles the traffic from the great London docks close at hand. High warehouses rise at the side; the sooty trail of steamers pollutes the air toward the river. In one direction, however, the view has suggestions the reverse of commonplace. Looking thither the sensitive beholder feels with deep emotion the fact brought home to him, that to men of English speech, the earth has scarcely a spot more memorable than the ground where he is standing. There rise, as they have risen for eight hundred years, the gray walls of the Tower,--the moat in the foreground, the battlemented line of masonry behind; within, the white keep, with its four turrets.... As mothers have shed tears there for imprisoned children, so children standing there have wondered which blocks in the grim masonry covered the dungeons of their fathers and mothers. Again and again, too, through the ages, all London has gathered, waiting in a hush for the dropping of the drawbridge before the Byward Tower, and the coming forth of the mournful train, conducting some world-famous man to the block draped with black, on the scaffold to the left, where the hill is highest.... On the 14th of June in 1662 in the full glory of the summer, Vane, in the strength of his manhood, was brought forth to die." Thus writes James K. Hosmer in his scholarly biography of Vane. He quotes an eye-witness, who relates how cheerfully and readily Vane went from his chamber to the sledge which took him to the scaffold, and how "from the tops of houses, and out of windows, the people used such means and gestures as might best discover, at a distance, their respects and love to him, crying aloud, 'The Lord go with you, the great G.o.d of Heaven and Earth appear in you and for you.' When asked how he did, he answered, 'Never better in my life.' Loud were the acclamations of the people, crying out, 'The Lord Jesus go with your dear soul.'" As Vane stepped upon the scaffold, clad in a black suit and cloak and scarlet waistcoat, a silence fell, and calmly, serenely, he addressed the throng around him. His address displeased the officers, and the trumpets were commanded to silence him. His words, however, had been well prepared and delivered in writing to a friend, so that the world to-day knows with what dignity and truth he spoke. His prayer, however, was not thus broken. "Thy servant, that is now falling asleep, doth heartily desire of thee, that thou shouldst forgive his enemies, and not lay this sin to their charge.... I bless the Lord that I have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer."

The heads of Cromwell and Bradshaw hung on the poles of Westminster Hall when Vane's fell. Blake's and Ireton's bodies had been flung into dishonoured graves. Pym and Hampden had died early in the civil strife.

Algernon Sidney was to be a later victim. In Jewin Street the blind Milton was solacing himself in an uncertain seclusion and quietude, with the preparation of his "Paradise Lost." Everything the Puritans had stood for seemed eclipsed. But the truths these men had lived and died for could not die. Says Lowell, writing for his countrymen: "It was the red dint on Charles's block that marked one in our era."

The reign of the Stuarts was doomed, and the Nemesis of what they stood for was a.s.sured. Says John Richard Green: "England for the last two hundred years has done little more than carry out in a slow and tentative way, but very surely, the programme laid down by Vane and his friends at the close of the Civil War." It was government of the people, by the people, for the people, for which Vane and Was.h.i.+ngton and Lincoln lived.

Without the foresight and the valour of the brave man who died on Tower Hill the work accomplished by the two later heroes might not have been a.s.sured.

CHAPTER IX.

ALL HALLOWS, BARKING.--ST. OLAVE'S.--ST. CATHERINE CREE'S.--ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT